On January 17, 2024, a judicial appointee of a President whose administration sharply curtailed antitrust enforcement* blocked a $3.8 billion attempt by JetBlue to merge its way into making the Big Four U.S. airlines (American, Delta, United, and Southwest) into the Big Five (with JetBlue as
As I mentioned last month in Antitrust Enforcers Must Have More Funding, the Antitrust Division in the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission need a boost of $340 million from current funding just to return them (in constant dollars) to 1979
Robert Bork said that serving on the U.S. Supreme Court “would be an intellectual feast”.[1]
Abstract, arcane, and avid for tricky math, the technocratic approach Bork advocated in The Antitrust Paradox: A Policy at War with Itself has all but devoured the faintly-beating populist heart of antitrust law.
As a result, Paradox has for the 45 years since its 1978 debut made antitrust enforcement actions increasingly costly to bring, far harder to win, and challenging for even competition experts to understand.
In an economy that has grown 1,000 percent since 1978, suffers from far greater concentration of markets, and brims with ever more gigantic firms, antitrust agencies need more resources (in terms of today’s dollars) than they did then.
Yet they have less. That must change.[2]Continue Reading Antitrust enforcers must have more funding
Welcome to the spring break edition of Commercial Roundup. This week’s highlights include a fantastic round-robin interview of six women lawyers who’ve made their way to the top of antitrust-world and the end of a saga about a non-lawyer who helped mass-tort firms “sign up clients” for money.
This week you’ll find me at the Spring Meeting of the ABA’s Antitrust Law Section in Washington, DC. Send me an email (bbarnett@susmangodfrey.com) if you’ve also come to the this year’s antitrust nerd-fest and either see an especially recondite, funny, or otherwise notable presentation or would like to say hello.
Stephen D. Susman, the founder of my firm and a titan in the antitrust bar, pioneered representing private antitrust plaintiffs on a contingent-fee basis.
Nobody knew better than Steve how to manage risk in antitrust cases — how to choose them, staff them, litigate them,
On Aug. 12, the AAntitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice joined with the attorneys-general of six states and the District of Columbia to file a lawsuit to stop the merger of AMR, which owns American Airlines, into U.S. Airways. You can see the complaint here.
The filing took Blawgletter by surprise. Living in DFW, which
You've likely heard by now that the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice sued Apple and a bunch of e-book publishers for fixing prices on, well, e-books.
You can see the complaint here.
The key part comes in paragraph 7, which explains Apple's "agency" plan for thwarting Amazon's effort to cut all
Dang. The Antitrust Division has teeth after all.
(Blawgletter called it in March, by the way.)
Per the WSJ, the AD sued to enjoin the deal for AT&T to acquire T-Mobile.
The pact would create the biggest, baddest, anticompetitivest wireless firm in the U.S.
The Division's press release said:
The department’s lawsuit, filed in
Warren Buffett once called credit default swaps "financial weapons of mass destruction" — and later bought a mess of them.
Why would the Oracle of Omaha turn such a seeming hypocrite?
He didn't. Not really. When he got CDSs, he did it to protect himself against possible losses on actual investments he'd made. A CDS, you
How can you hold down the cost of hiring the best talent?
In lots of businesses, the skill, knowledge, and creativity of workers make a crucial difference. Those traits matter most on the high end of the high-end. Think law, medicine, engineering, physics, computer science, rocket science, oenology, epistemology, and macrame. The high-end could hardly exist without these